Ebook: President Nixon: Alone in the White House

Who was Nixon? An amazing thing about him wasn't what he did as president, but that he became president. Reeves' "President Nixon" uses 1000s of interviews & recently discovered or declassified documents & tapes--including Nixon's tortured memos to himself & unpublished sections of Haldeman's diaries--to offer a portrait of the brilliant contradictory man alone in the White House. This is a narrative of an introvert who dreamed of becoming the architect of his times. Late at night, he sat upstairs in the White House writing notes to himself on yellow pads, struggling to define himself & his goals: "Compassionate, Bold, New, Courageous...Zest for the job (not lonely but awesome). Goals--reorganized govt...Each day a chance to do something memorable for someone. Need to be good to do good...Need for joy, serenity, confidence, inspiration." But downstairs he was building a house of deception. He trusted no one because he thought others were like him. He governed by secret orders & false records, memorizing scripts for public appearances, even for one-on-one meetings with his staff & cabinet. His principal assistants, Haldeman & Kissinger, spied on him as he spied on them, while cabinet members, generals & admirals spied on all of them--rifling briefcases & desks, tapping phones in a house where no one knew what was true. Nixon's 1st aim was to restore order in an America at war with itself over Vietnam. But actually he prolonged the fighting, lying about what was happening both in the field & in the peace negotiations. He startled the world by going to Peoples' China & seeking detente with the Soviets--& then secretly persuaded Mao & Brezhnev to lie to protect his petty secrets. Still, he was a man of vision, imagining a new world order, trying to stall the race war he believed was inevitable between the West, including Russia, & Asia, led by China & Japan. At home, he promised welfare reform, revenue sharing, drug programs & environmental protection. He reluctantly presided over school desegregation--all the while declaring that domestic governance was building outhouses in Peoria. Reeves shows a presidency doomed from the start. It begins with Nixon & Kissinger using the CIA to cover up a '69 murder by US soldiers in Vietnam that led to the publication of the Pentagon Papers, then to counterintelligence units in the White House & finally to the burglaries & cover-up known as Watergate.